


Turnaround

by Opalgirl



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Big Bang Challenge, Gen, Mental Health Issues, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-30
Updated: 2012-10-30
Packaged: 2017-11-17 09:00:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 8,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalgirl/pseuds/Opalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ada Shepard (Colonist/Ruthless) went into the final battle fully expecting to die, but when she wakes up in a military hospital on one of Jupiter's moons after a 'Destroy' ending, she has to come to terms with being alive in a post-Reaper world and face some of her old demons. Written for Mass Effect Big Bang 2012, with an awesome accompanying fanmix by Cherith <a href="http://cherith.livejournal.com/829011.html">here.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The bitter song, the heavy load

**Author's Note:**

> Story and chapter titles come from Stan Rogers' song "Turnaround", and I claim no ownership of it.

_“Commander? Commander, can you hear me—?”_

“ _Shit—!”_

The sounds of voices faded away before she could acknowledge them and she assumed this was just another nightmare, where the voices of the dead spoke to her and their shadows followed her. Where she was going, there would be no more nightmares, at least….

 _“What the—is that_ Shepard? _”_

_“Commander? You’re going to be okay, ma’am….”_

_“….I sure as hell hope that surgical team’s scrubbed and ready to go, because….”_

Not a nightmare, then. It didn’t seem like any of the other ones.

“ _Move it! Move, now!”_

If she could have, she would have reacted to that shout, but her body seemed to be useless, her limbs refusing to move, and it was just too much work…. Besides, there was no point. It was over now, that much she was sure of.

She… _floated_ , for a time, aware of sound and some sensation, but unable to react. She remembered the old human religious belief in purgatory for just an instant before it all slipped away again.

One coherent thought greeted her as she struggled to throw off the dazed feeling that clouded her mind: _Air’s wrong_. Whatever she was breathing _wasn’t_ the recycled air of the _Normandy._ There was something wrong, the least of which being that wherever she was was quiet, quieter than any active ship, and…

“Get the nurse,” someone—a woman, and why was that voice familiar?—said. “I think she’s waking up. Commander?”

She blinked, looking up at a concrete ceiling instead of the window over the bed in the Loft, the lights in the room far brighter than what she was used to. Something was very, _very_ wrong, and for fuck’s sake, she didn’t even have a weapon. She tried to sit up to search for something—anything—to arm herself with, but fell back as her arms gave.

“Commander? Commander, it’s all right.” The face that appeared in her field of view was suddenly very familiar. “Just—stay there, please?”

“Specialist Traynor,” she said, as the name came to her mind. “What are you doing here?” Her voice wasn’t much more than a hoarse croak, but she had to know. “Where the hell are we?” _Why am I even still alive?_ She thought and didn’t ask.

Traynor beamed at her. “You’re in a field hospital on Callisto, Commander.”

"Fort Merritt?” Shepard hazarded a guess. Merritt was the only installation on Callisto that she knew of, but so much had changed.

“Very good, Commander,” someone else  said, entering the room. “It’s an honour—and a pleasure—to see you awake.” The man who came to stand at the end of her bed was middle-aged with greying hair and a tall, lanky frame. “Dr. Graham Averill at your service.”

“Honour’s mine, Doctor,” she answered. “Because I figure you’re the one who put me back together.”

Averill laughed at that and the sound seemed to grate on her hearing. “No, ma’am. That was a rather impressive medical team on the ground in London. How are you feeling?”

 _I’m thinking that I’m supposed to be dead, but you don’t want to hear that_. “All right,” she said, reaching up to scrub at her face with her hands. She felt worse than she had after the contact with the beacon on Eden Prime, worse than she had after the battle for the Citadel, but just about the same as she had when she’d woken up on Lazarus Station. “I seem to be bad at the whole dying thing, though.”

Traynor looked surprised and the doctor didn’t react as he scanned her with his omni-tool. “Everything looks good, Commander.” He gave her a look, one of an experienced military physician used to dealing with exceptionally stubborn patients. “But I need you to stay put. There’ll be a rehab specialist up to visit you in the next couple of days.”

“I’m just a soldier, Doc,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t need special treatment.” She refused to think about the resources that had been taken from other wounded troops to keep _her_ ass alive.

“Of course not, Commander.” Averill tapped something on his omni-tool a few times and reached out to shake her hand.

Startled by the contact—she’d known it was coming, but when was the last time she’d shaken someone’s hand without a glove in the way?—she flinched before she gathered herself properly and returned his handshake.

Averill just nodded, his gaze sharp and knowing. “I’ll see you again, Commander. Call the nurse if you need anything in the meantime. And thank you.”

When he was gone, Shepard turned her attention to Traynor. “You think you can get me news reports? And maybe Fleet Admiral Hackett on the comms?”

“Commander—” Traynor interrupted herself. “Of course. I’m sorry. I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’d appreciate it, Specialist. I need to know what the hell’s going on out there and see what the next move is.”

 


	2. When stacked against the choices you made

Her first visitor showed up in the middle of a poor quality call with Hackett.

“Commander,” the Admiral said, his voice crackling a little. “I admit, I’m surprised to hear from you.”

“I’m seeing these numbers, sir,” she said. _And if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I’d ask if they were real_. “It doesn’t look good.” She tried to sit up a little straighter in her bed. London, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, Cairo, Shanghai, Tokyo, Stockholm, Armstrong—Earth’s largest cities, all in ruins. Potentially _billions_ of people either dead or MIA, and the numbers she had in front of her were only from Earth and Luna. The death tolls, so far, didn’t even account for the human colonies and stations destroyed, never mind Thessia or Palaven.

If she was honest with herself, it was bad. Worse than bad. It was a damned nightmare. They’d be decades rebuilding, if they ever could. And maybe if she’d been faster, been able to pull a stronger army together, so many _innocent_ people wouldn’t be dead.

“It’s going to be one hell of an uphill battle, Shepard,” Hackett continued, jarring her out of her thoughts, “but the worst is over. The casualty numbers are lower than what we’d expected. Had we _not_ known the Reapers were coming, this would have been a thousand times worse. We owe that—and much more—to you. If you want to return to active duty eventually, I won’t say no. But you and I both know you’re not fit for duty at the moment.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.” She tried not to clench her jaw in anger. The little bit of advance warning she’d been able to give, once she’d convinced them to listen to her, obviously hadn’t been enough.

“ _Thank you_ , Commander. Hackett out.”

“Back to work already, Lola? Jeeze, you got the big boss on the comm and everything.”

Shepard rolled her eyes at the nickname. “What bet did you lose, Lieutenant?” she asked Vega, picking up one of the datapads on the bedside table.

“Hey! Can’t I come and see how you’re doing? _Oyente_ came down and told us you were awake.”

 _Oyente_ —his nickname for Traynor, she remembered. The time spent aboard the _Normandy_ with diplomats aboard and barely out-manoeuvring Reapers seemed so long ago already. “Us?” No one had mentioned what had become of the rest of her people and she’d assumed they’d scattered in the wake of the destruction.

“Yeah. Gunny’s still on Earth, but Sparks and Doc are here. Joker and Cortez fly shuttle runs and patrols outta here. Think Javik’s sulking around the base somewhere, but hell if I know where.”

“And you? Figured you’d be groundside in the thick of it.” She knew Vega, knew the kind of soldier he was, knew that he wouldn’t manipulate his way into an easy assignment. “Sitting around here doesn’t sound like you.”

“Got me on admin duty for now, moving people and stuff around. This place is pretty busy.”

“Admin duty more interesting than babysitting me?” She asked.

“Yeah.” Vega shrugged, then reached out as if to shake her hand. “Told the nurse I wouldn’t stay, but, uh, it’s good to see you awake. It was pretty bad for a while.”

She shook his hand, forcing down the part of her that cringed at the touch. Now that she knew it was coming, it was easier to hide. “I was telling the doc earlier that I’m bad at the whole dying thing. Thanks, Vega.” Damn it, she hated this. People wanted to fawn over her and call her a hero or damn her for what she’d done and she just wanted to be left alone for a while.

If she was left alone, even if it was only briefly, maybe the turmoil inside her head would _stop_. It was always there and there seemed to be no end to it, no way to turn it off so she could have what little peace she’d earned. The voices of the people she’d gotten killed, the screams of the wounded and dying, the sounds of mortars and rockets exploding around her, sounds of breaking glass and bending steel, all ran together to create a cacophony that never seemed to end; it was like white noise at the back of her skull, no matter what she did.

“Uh… Lola? Hey, Commander? You okay?”

She blinked. “Fine, Vega,” she said. “Just… tired, I guess.”

He seemed to buy it or at least accept it. So her voice couldn’t have been as shaky as she’d feared. “Don’t jump right back into work, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Don’t think that’ll happen for a while.”

.Finally left alone, with the door to her hospital room sealed for privacy, she slept. The nurses and the guard posted outside would keep visitors away, for now.


	3. Every time you turned around

_“Ada,_ ma belle. _” Her mother’s voice, speaking in her mother tongue and achingly familiar. “_ Ma petite, _what’s happened to you?”_

_She knew that this was a dream or a hallucination or some other trick of the mind; her mother was more than fifteen years dead. But damn if it didn’t hurt. She’d been hearing the dead speaking to her for months, though. Shepard strained to see, but even her heavily augmented vision couldn’t see through the darkness around her._

_“You did good, child, you did good. I’m proud of…”_

Anderson _. Not the first casualty of the war and not the last, but the only one of her allies that_ she’d _shot. And he’d spent his last breaths praising her for what she’d done, telling her he was_ proud _of her._

_“I don’t regret a thing, Commander…”_

_“Had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong….”_

_“It’s an honour to serve with you, ma’am….”_

“ _…Shepard-Commander. …Does this unit have a soul?”_

_The faces of the dead—human, salarian, asari, turian, krogan, geth, quarian—seemed to appear before her, in shadow. Friends and family and allies alike, and she could name most of them._

_“Three hundred thousand batarians are dead, Shepard. With your history, this seems like a deliberate massacre…”_

_“Your entire left flank is gone…!”_

She was jolted out of the nightmare and into wakefulness. The sounds of gunfire and mortars and the strange sound that the Reapers emitted echoed around her head and Shepard grasped the rail on her bed with her right hand and bowed her head, trying to catch her breath.

Sitting idle right now would only give her time to think, and that would go nowhere good. Thinking was the last thing she needed to do. What she needed was to be _active;_ exercise had always been the best method for distracting or grounding herself and had been since she’d first started running.

No one would give her a rifle for drill here and there wasn’t anything in the room suitable for doing pull-ups on. There wasn’t even anything she could use as a makeshift set of weights, and running was out of the question. But there was just enough floor space in her room that she should be able to run through a few stretches and push-ups. Anything to keep her mind off what she saw every time she closed her eyes.

Getting out of bed was fairly easy; she even managed to find a loose-fitting pair of pants that had been left for her and pull those on. She remembered being injured during the final battle, but her cybernetic body had healed itself well. She wasn’t in her best shape, Shepard thought while she carefully stretched, but she felt a hell of a lot better than she’d expected.

She was almost through her second set of push-ups when someone knocked and the door slid open.

“Shepard? Are you—?”

“63. Down here, Tali,” she called to the quarian. Her shoulders were starting to ache and her right leg was weaker than it ought to be, but she’d push on.

“Do—” Tali hesitated. “Do you think you should be doing that?”

Pushing herself to her feet, Shepard stretched her arms above her head. “There’s only so long I can sit here and stare at things or read the news,” she said with a shrug. “It’s good to see you, Tali. I thought that you’d be back on the Flotilla.”

“Not yet.” Tali extended her hand and Shepard shook it, glad that the quarian hadn’t wanted a hug. She just… wasn’t up for hugging. Simply shaking someone’s hand was hard enough lately.

“I’m supposed to leave in a few hours,” Tali explained, “but I had to see how you were doing before I left. Keelah, Shepard—you, you did it.”

 _I did_. Somehow, she wasn’t quite conscious of the fact that the Reapers were _gone_ , that she’d been instrumental in fighting that battle. (No matter what the press would say, she sure as hell hadn’t done it alone). “It’s still kind of unreal, sometimes,” she said, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “Kind of hard to get my head around.”

“Yeah. I—”

 _Hell, was it even worth it_? Thessia, Palaven, Earth, more worlds than she wanted to think about, all in ruins and some probably uninhabitable. Would it have been better to die than to face this kind of a world…. No. Turian lines didn’t break, and Alliance marines didn’t just roll over and quit. Going down without a fight wouldn’t have set right with her, with any of them.

Tali reached out to her for a hug and it took Shepard a minute to realize. Biting the inside of her cheek to stop the cringing shudder that she hadn’t been able to explain or stop yet, she leaned forward and hugged the quarian.

“Keep in touch, okay?” Tali asked her, and Shepard imagined she was smiling. “We’ve been through too much together now, Shepard. You’re stuck with me.”

“You’ll be busy enough without me,” she said, running one hand over her head and thinking, not for the first time, that she needed a haircut. “But I’ll do my best.”

“Thank you, Shepard—for everything.”


	4. Although I could have said much more had I dared

_“Whoa! Put the gun down, kid.”_

_“It’s okay. We’re not gonna hurt you, kid. We picked up the beacon on patrol, and we came to help.”_

_“… Can you tell me your name, honey?”_

_She was sixteen again, seeing the soldiers who’d found her after the batarians had left; the friendly faces offering her water and a blanket and emergency rations. They’d found her at the edge of a cornfield; she’d been hiding in the stalks for three days, and had come out when she’d heard voices. She’d picked up the shotgun when she found it next to her father’s body—his face so mutilated she hadn’t even recognized him at first—and run._

_“Smart thinkin’, hiding in the corn,” one of them said, looking at her. “Can’t see you at all. Hell, get turned around in there and you wouldn’t be able to find yourself.”_

_Was she supposed to thank him? “… They burned the other fields,” she said, pointing. The grain, the hay for the livestock, and the second cornfield. “…Didn’t get to this one.” She wondered how they’d feed the animals or eat next season…. And then remembered that it didn’t matter. There was no one else left._

_“We’ve been looking,” said the woman who told her to put the gun down, “but we haven’t found anyone else. Do you know where anybody else might be hiding?”_

_She shook her head. “No. They—they took everyone else who wasn’t dead.”_

Shepard lurched out of her chair and stumbled into the bathroom, her stomach heaving. She’d seen more than her share of blood and death and destruction, but something about remembering Mindoir almost always made her sick. She didn’t know if it was because they were friends and family—her father, her brother, her neighbours—and not strangers or aliens or mercenaries or something else entirely, but it always happened.

She fought the nausea down using every trick she’d learned when training for her zero-g qualification, willing her insides to stop heaving. It worked and she gathered herself again, pausing to splash some water over her face.

Someone knocked on the hospital room door as she made to return to her chair and she frowned. More company? “Come in.”

Joker walked into the room, still in uniform, hat and everything. “Hey, Commander. Good to see you up and around.”

 _Damn it._ “Jeff, I—” what in the hell could she say? “I’m sorry I killed your synthetic girlfriend so we could win the war”? She was shit at apologies to begin with, but this…. “About EDI… I’m sorry.”

He blinked. “Thanks, Shepard. Y’know, so far, you’re the only person who’s bothered to say that?”

Considering it _had_ been her fault, well…. “What can I say? My mother raised me right.” Her attempt at a joke fell flat, and they both knew it.

“Your mother raised you to shoot things in the head, Shepard?” Of course, he’d found some way to save her failed joke.

“Nah. A DI taught me that.”

“Lemme guess, you’re not telling where you learned the the whole ‘not dying’ thing, huh?”

No matter what she thought about it, even if she did think she ought to be dead and that maybe they’d all be better off that way, Joker had a point. “If I ever figure it out,” she said, “I’ll tell you. I wondered how the hell I was alive when I woke up this time, to be honest.”

“So, uh, it’s good to see you in one piece, Shepard, but I’m gonna go… You know, in case Cortez decides to take the ship joyriding or something.”

She tried to imagine Cortez taking the _Normandy_ for a joyride and failed. “Doesn’t seem like the type.”

Joker narrowed his eyes at her. “It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch. You’re quiet, and nobody knows you’re dangerous ‘til you’ve got them in your sights.”

He was right, Shepard supposed. “All right, get outta here then. Go guard her.”


	5. Though the offer was there

Someone knocked on the closed door of her hospital room and Shepard lifted her head, tossing aside the datapad containing the most recent data from the Local Cluster overall, and acknowledged her visitor.

“Liara,” she said, as the asari walked into the room, her clothes in an unusual state of disarray. “Is there something wrong?” Liara’s rumpled appearance had put her on alert, the well-trained instincts kicking in fast. She didn’t have a weapon, but depending on the situation, she wouldn’t need one.

“No, Shepard. Relax,” Liara said, holding up her hands. “What—oh?” She looked down at herself and smiled a little. “Oh—I was out with an excavation team,” she explained, dusting off her hands. “I _am_ an archaeologist, Shepard.”

“Sounds like fun,” Shepard agreed, forcing herself to be cheerful. “Find anything?”

“Mmm, not yet,” Liara shook her head. “There are possibilities, though. I thought I’d stop in and see how you were doing. Specialist Traynor said you were up and around. How are you feeling?”

She blinked. She’d been angry when she’d learned that Liara had given her body to Cerberus and they hadn’t been friends, not really. Shepard considered, looking down at the fresh scars on her right hand and arm. “I’ve felt worse,” she admitted. “The hard part is keeping myself occupied so I don’t think too much.”

Liara nodded seriously. “I can’t imagine, Shepard. But it’s over; it’s really over.”

“Yeah. I’ll believe that in a couple years,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “The Reapers are gone, but there’s probably something else out there almost as bad. Things aren’t just ‘over’ when I’m involved, remember?”

Liara sat down in the second battered chair in  her room and said, “That still doesn’t diminish what you’ve done, Shepard. You managed to unite the turians and the krogan and the quarians and the geth. You stopped the Reapers. We watched them stop and collapse… like someone had cut the power to them. It was startling.”

Shepard shook her head a little in disbelief. “Is that how it happened? I didn’t see it. I had to make a choice, but I never realized that it was that kind of….” She rubbed the heel of one hand against her forehead and said, “Shit. That must have been terrifying.”

“It was disconcerting,” Liara said, reaching out to take her hand in a friendly gesture.

Damn, why did asari have to be so touchy-feely? It wasn’t their fault, and Liara was more restrained about it than some. Touch lately made her skin crawl and bile rise in the back of her throat. “Yeah, sounds like it,” Shepard agreed. She let Liara loosely hold her hand and tried to suppress the shiver that wanted to run through her body.

Remembering that damned kid, with the face that had haunted her since Vancouver, and her decisions laid out before her, none of them good or easy or the ‘right’ one, Shepard shook her head, glancing away from Liara. “You saw it,” she said. “Vancouver, London, Thessia, Palaven. All of those worlds in pieces and not a damn thing I could do to help.” Men who were too slow to get out of the beam’s way screaming and dying all around her, the ruined rubble of what had been homes where ordinary people lived, the hollow-eyed stares of civilian resistance fighters and Alliance soldiers alike…. The rumbling sound of an approaching ship made her look out of her room’s one window to see an Alliance cruiser limping into dock, listing heavily to her starboard side.

“Must be one of the ones pulled out of drydock somewhere,” she said, nodding toward the window. “That’s an _old_ cruiser—I’ve served on a hell of a lot of ships, but not one like that.”

“It looks like it’s taken some damage,” Liara remarked, letting go of Shepard’s hand finally.

“Yeah. Her weapons would have been stripped before they put her up… but if you gave her an escort, I bet you could use her as a transport. Impressed that she survived an FTL jump listing like that though.”

The comparison between herself and the wounded ship struck Shepard suddenly and she gave a little mental shake of the head. Maybe it was a fair comparison, but she really didn’t want to think about it.

“You like ships?” Liara asked.

She felt her lips twitch in a tiny smile. “I’m no quarian,” Shepard said, watching yet another shuttle take off, “and I’m not Joker, but…an Alliance soldier’s only as good as their ship.”

“Shepard, how are you, really?” Liara asked after a moment’s pause. “You seemed fairly convinced that you weren’t going to survive this and then you did.”

And there it was, the real question. She rubbed her hand over her face and said, “It’s… hard. By rights, I should have died on the Citadel, but here I am. I was—I still am—tired as hell, and I was almost looking forward to going out with a bang. The shit I’ve done, I really didn’t deserve to come out of that one alive. I’m still here, though, and it’s something I’ve got to deal with.”

Liara nodded again, thankfully _quietly_ sympathetic. “I can’t say I understand, but I think I see where you’re coming from. And, Shepard, I’m sorry about Admiral Anderson. I always liked him and I know you counted him as a friend.”

She’d almost been able to put her old friend’s death aside, not permanently, but long enough to get herself back together, until Liara had brought it up. She swallowed and said, “you know, he commanded the cruiser that responded to the distress beacon on Mindoir? He and his crew convinced me to sign up, during the trip back to Alliance space.”

“And look at what’s happened because of that,” Liara said. “I’ve read your records, Shepard, and I know there are things you’ve done that you’re not proud of, but at the same time, you’re an incredible leader.”

“Yeah. People keep saying that, but sometimes I wonder.”


	6. But some are meant to stay behind and it's always that way

_“You_ like _seeing people get blown to bits?! Crazy bitch! What in the hell was the fuckin’ point of that?!”_

 _As her second-in-command railed at her about the deaths of his comrades, wide-eyed and bloody, she looked up from her boots and said, “Chief Kendall. Stand. Down_.”

 _“You—Jesus fuckin’ H. Christ…. Why? Maybe_ you _don’t give a goddamn, but those were_ our _guys, and there’s nothin’  left of them. Don’t_ you _fuckin’ well stand there and tell me to ‘stand down’_!”

The terminal set up in her room bleeped, distracting her from her thoughts. She’d been left to her own devices long enough, and her thoughts had turned where they almost always did lately; back to something she’d fucked up or someone she’d gotten killed. She’d taken Kendall’s punch square on the jaw that day, she remembered, and hadn’t said anything about it, or written it up. He’d been rightfully angry, she’d realized later, once the haze had cleared from her mind. She’d deserved _more_ than a punch for her actions that day.

Turning back to the terminal, Shepard frowned to see someone was calling her. She’d spoken with Hackett, Vega had told her that Ash was still on Earth and that Garrus had returned to the Hierarchy’s fleet, and she’d seen the rest of her crew in person.

She keyed up the call and waited for it to go through.

“Shepard. Bet you look like shit,” said a voice interspersed with static.

“Jack?” Shepard felt her eyebrows lift. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.” She’d tried to help Jack, reminded of what might have happened to her if things had been different, but she’d never been sure where they stood, or if they could even be called friends.

“Joker told me where I could call you,” Jack said. “Said you’d finally gotten your ass out of bed.”

“Yeah. How are the kids?” Shepard sat down on the edge of her bed, smiling a little despite herself. It’d been strange, seeing _Jack_ responsible for a group of teenagers, but like she’d said, she couldn’t think of anyone who’d care about them more. And Jack had proved her right, in an odd  way.

“Little shits think they’re big fuckin’ heroes now.” Despite the harsh words, she could hear the pride in Jack’s voice.

“They did a hell of a job on the ground. You should be proud of them.”

“Yeah, whatever. I’ll tell them that the Queen of the Girl Scouts says so.”

The laugh snuck up on Shepard before she could stop it or even muffle it. “I’m the most fucked up Girl Scout in the galaxy, Jack.”

“You do… stuff for people, Shepard. Run around saving them and shit. Pretty damn near a Girl Scout, but you go around shooting things in the head. Heard you were pretty fucked up when they dug you out.”

“Yeah.” She knew that her right side, from her calf to her shoulder, was a mess of new scars, and it looked like she’d caught a piece of shrapnel in the stomach at one point. “That’s what they say. Good thing there’s no one waiting at home for me—got some pretty impressive scars outta this.”

“Hey, if you listen to Garrus, having one half of your face scarred to fuck is sexy,” Jack argued.

“To a turian, maybe. Or a krogan. You still on Earth?”

“Yup. The engineers keep saying they’re gonna steal my guys and put ‘em to work. I tell them to _try_. No place left down here to get them all inked, or I would.”

"Yeah—” The thought of rebuilding Earth alone made Shepard wince. Earth was just the tip of the destruction, _one_ planet out of hundreds that had been destroyed. She knew from looking at the numbers that governments had bankrupted themselves funding the war effort and the funds for rebuilding probably weren’t there. When she thought about going back to Earth, she dreaded it. Seeing the Citadel’s refugee camp had been hard enough; she didn’t know how much more of _that_ she could see.

She wasn’t in denial of the facts: There were people living in tents and shipping containers and people scrounging for food just to survive; she’d seen some of the vid feeds, after all. But she wasn’t sure she could get down and look it in the eye again. 

“Shepard?” Jack’s voice, over the call, crackled again. “You coming back down here?”

She shrugged, even though she knew that Jack couldn’t see it. “I don’t know. Not my decision, and I gotta get ‘em to let me out of the hospital first.”

“I’d spring you, but you’re on Jupiter or some shit, right?”

“Yup.” Turning her head, Shepard watched the shuttles flying in to the base from her window. There weren’t refugees here, just wounded soldiers and the Alliance personnel running the fort’s day-to-day. From what she could see from her window, the fort had taken little damage. "Callisto.”

“Get the hell back down here, Shepard,” Jack said. “I can even get my hands on some black-market booze.”

“Sounds good to me,” Shepard replied. “Sounds really good, actually. I could go for a drink.”

“Yeah, me and you both, boss-lady. Me and you both.”


	7. Yours is the open road, the bitter song, the heavy load that I'll never share

Shepard had been awake for four days, idling her time away, climbing the walls of her room, walking circles of the hospital ward, and entertaining visitors who the nurses and the enlisted men posted at her door allowed in. Vega and Cortez had shown up with a deck of cards and allowed her to beat them thoroughly at poker the night before, and Traynor had shown up with a box of her personal possessions from the _Normandy_ earlier.

She couldn’t rest. Sleep was easy enough, but rest wasn’t, and there was a definite difference between the two. She had learned to sleep anywhere, under almost any circumstances during her time with the Alliance; she could sleep in the back of a drop-shuttle in a hardsuit, if she had to. But _rest,_ waking up and feeling refreshed, was something that was out of her reach. The shadows with the voices of the dead still haunted her.

“Commander Shepard, good morning.”

She was still poking at her breakfast, watching the shuttles out the window again when a strange woman entered her room.

“Good morning,” she said cautiously, realizing that the guards on her door had let this stranger in.

“My apologies, Commander. I’m Dr. Henry, and I’m a psychologist assigned to Fort Merritt. Dr. Averill requested that I check in on you.”

 _Oh, for fuck’s_ sake. _A shrink_. Shepard tried not to grind her teeth. Her interactions with Alliance shrinks had never been positive, not once in her entire career. “I appreciate the concern, Doctor, but I—”

“May I have a seat?” The doctor smiled, her voice syrupy sweet.

Shepard exhaled and forced her jaw to unclench. _That_ tone of voice got under her skin so quickly. “I think you’re wasting your time, Doctor, but…” she gestured to the second well-worn chair in her room, shrugging.

“Why is that, Commander?” Henry asked, sitting down and settling a datapad on her knee. “Why _do_ you think I’m wasting my time?”

Shepard shook her head. “I’m fucked up, Doc. There are people groundside who could use your help and they’d get a hell of a lot more out of it than I will.”

To her credit, Henry’s face remained neutral. “This isn’t about the troops on Earth, Commander. This is about you.”

Shepard sighed and leaned back in her chair, realizing that it would take more to make this woman let go. “It’s _never_ been about _me_. I’m a figurehead and I’m a figurehead no one needs anymore. I don’t believe for half a second that they’re going to send me back to duty—nope, they’ll give me a medal and a pat on the head and shuttle me off to retirement, so this is just a waste of time and resources.”

“Let’s say that you’re right and that is what happens. You get your retirement and your pension. What then? What will you do?”

Shepard resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Really? “Hell if I know. I wasn’t exactly _planning_ my retirement. Didn’t think I’d get one, to be honest.” _Shit_. Had she really just said that? Trying to pull it out of the ditch, she said, “I thought the Alliance would put me in front of a firing squad with what I’d done.”

“With what you’d—?”

 _For Christ’s sake_. “Drop it, doc. I know you’ve read my file. I put my entire unit through a meat grinder on Torfan,” _thanks, Joker. That’s a damn good description_ , “I let a damned good soldier die on my watch because I wasn’t _good enough_. I let Sovereign take down the _Destiny Ascension._ I was allied with Cerberus. Oh, and then there’s the time I wiped out a world home to three hundred thousand living beings. ‘ _The disgraced Commander Shepard’_ , remember?”

“Commander—”

“I was sixteen years old the first time I killed. I was seventeen when the Alliance took over and put a rifle in my hands. I was trained to put a bullet in a man’s head at two thousand yards, to never hesitate in pulling that trigger. I was trained to get the job done, regardless of the cost. Get in there and _get it done_. I did. Then they gave me a medal and wrote me off as a fucking monster. When I died, they threw me into the ditch and couldn’t wash their hands of me fast enough. I was a monster and a traitor. But when someone high up in Alliance brass needed a backroom job done, who’d he call? _Me_. When they needed a scapegoat and someone to do their dirty work, who did they pull out of lock-up? _Me_. And I got it done.” She shook her head. “They were perfectly happy to write me off as a bloodthirsty bitch and a monster before. They never wanted to help before. So don’t tell me you’re here to help _now_. I don’t buy it.”

“Whether you believe me or not, Commander, I am here to help.”

“And I’m a pink elcor. Don’t think I don’t know what this is about. You’ll file your reports and _my ass_ will get Cat 6’ed and locked up somewhere, ‘cause Shepard finally went off the fuckin’ deep end, well, isn’t that just too damn bad. _Not gonna happen_. I won’t let it.”

Henry only blinked and paused for an instant before consulting her datapad. “…. The soldier you mention specifically. That was a… Lieutenant Alenko, wasn’t it? Let’s talk about that. About him.”

“No.”

“No?”

Shepard bit the inside of her cheek and felt her hands twitch. “ _No_. Having to look his mother and father in the eye when I couldn’t even give them back his tags? When I’d fucked up so badly that they couldn’t even give their kid a decent _burial_? That was enough.”

“Did you get along with Lieutenant Alenko? Were you friends?”

“I was his _commanding officer_ , not his buddy. We worked together.”

“Surely you didn’t have to meet with his parents, did you?” The doctor asked, as she produced a stylus from a pocket. “You were busy.”

“I was on a wild goose chase that no one else cared about. And if I can make decisions that get a man killed and I can’t look his mother or his husband or wife or kids in the eye, I don’t deserve to command a goddamned _barge_.”


	8. I didn't think they meant a lot or said much for you

“One can hardly argue with that, Commander. It seems rather honourable of you.”

 _‘Commander’ this and ‘Commander’ that._ Rubbing at her eyes with one hand, feeling drained already, Shepard reached for the cup of sludge that passed for coffee on this station that was on the table. “You can drop the ‘Commander’, doc. Call me Shepard.”

Dr. Henry nodded. “If that’s what you’d prefer.”

“Well, I’m definitely not commanding anything right now, am I?” Wincing as the horrible coffee scalded her tongue, Shepard set the cup down. It made her miss Gardner’s coffee, of all the stupid things.

“Point taken.” Henry crossed one leg over the other and continued, “I’m going to be blunt with you, Shepard. Dr. Averill asked me to look in on you because he was concerned you were exhibiting signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; as did Chief Medical Officer Chakwas, in the _Normandy’s_ medical logs.”

Something about those words sent Shepard scrambling, her mind running in a hundred directions at once. If—if they knew, if they knew about the mess inside her head and the noise that never seemed to stop, she was already as good as gone. One report, one wrong word, one slip, and she’d be written off as crazy. Shepard bit the inside of her cheek and said, “I appreciate the concern, but I’m….”

 _Why does it matter?_ The realization hit her like a punch to the gut. _What_ difference _is it going to make?_ She felt like she’d just locked onto a target and was lining up her shot, that strange moment of clarity, when the world narrowed down to what she could see through her scope. It was clear now: none of it mattered. She wasn’t protecting her career or saving the world by trying to pretend that everything was fine when it wasn’t. She didn’t have to divert time and resources from herself now. _Fuck it._ Maybe the good doctors had some kind of cure for making a person who ought to be dead _normal_ again. Maybe they’d be able to fix her, make it stop.

Or maybe they’d just lock her up somewhere safe, where she couldn’t do more damage.

“ _Goddamn it._ ” A sweep of her arm took out her breakfast tray and her coffee cup, sending them to the floor. The dishes clattered on the floor, but didn’t break—they weren’t glass, not fragile enough for that—and neither was she. She wasn’t some fragile little thing who needed to be picked up and carried… but…

A soldier’s only as strong as his unit, she remembered being told at some point; maybe it had been Gunny Ellison, maybe Anderson, maybe she’d seen it on one of those ridiculous posters on a station, but it didn’t matter where she’d heard it. A marine relied on their unit—a whole division, a squad, a fireteam, it didn’t matter—and didn’t fight alone. You learned to rely on each other—and if you had to carry someone’s ass until they could get back up, you did. It was different here, but yet almost the same thing.

“Shepard—?” Henry was still sitting in her chair, observing her closely. Coffee spattered the legs of her trousers, but she hadn’t moved.

“I haven’t been ‘right’ since I woke up with a couple of billion credits’ worth of tech inside me,” she said, slowly. “I broke some poor bastard’s nose while I was at Defence Command. I read my pilot the fucking riot act for trying to be my friend. I gave Admiral Anderson more shit than he deserved for trying to look out for me. And it doesn’t make _sense_ to me; I don’t _understand it_. Some days are normal and I don’t go around biting people’s heads off and then….” Shepard shrugged, telling the voice inside her head that screamed she was only making herself vulnerable to _shut the fuck up_. “But I’m used to looking out for me, and I sure as hell don’t expect anyone else to.”

“But it seems as if you look out for others,” Henry said, sounding oddly kind.

“Civilians. People who can’t protect themselves. I’m supposed to be stronger than that. I was trained to withstand torture, and some of the best interrogators can’t crack me—they’ve tried. Drop me almost anywhere and I could survive. My training, the best damn training in the fleet, included at least a dozen attempts to drown me. I once talked down an angry krogan with a gun to my head. I’m supposed to be self-reliant, to be able to look out for myself. I’m _supposed_ to practically have eyes in the back of my damn head. But I—I can still hear people screaming, people dying on my watch. I can still smell the blood and the smoke. I can still hear the Reapers and the fucking mortars dropping—and it just won’t _stop_.”

Henry met her gaze squarely and said, “I can help you make it stop, Shepard.”

The doctor’s confidence was strangely catching, almost gave her a little bit of hope, but…. “No drugs,” she said,holding up her hand. “You’re _not_ drugging me. I’d rather live with this than be drugged out of my mind for the rest of my life.” She thought about Toombs, the poor son of a bitch who’d been experimented on by Cerberus, locked up somewhere in a psychiatric hospital until he returned to “normal”. About Talitha, who’d escaped from batarian slavers, who would likely never live a normal life. About the marines she’d known who’d been Cat 6’ed because of the shit they’d seen; including some of the survivors from Torfan. She’d seen people drugged up and sedated, dull and withdrawn, minds clouded by substances—and hell, that wasn’t what she wanted. She would actually rather live like this.

“Drugs will be an absolute last resort, I promise. We’ll do it the hard way, first.”

 

***

Dr. Henry left her after that conversation, with a promise to come back, and Shepard sighed, trying to gather herself. That whole conversation had thrown her for a loop, left her rattled and feeling threatened. She wasn’t supposed to be vulnerable, not like this. She’d spent her entire military career keeping herself together, keeping herself to herself for the sake of her career. A  Cat 6 discharge had been her worst fear ever since Torfan.

It had mattered before—the military career had been all she’d ever known and if she’d lost that, she wouldn’t have known what else to do with herself. But now? It didn’t matter now. No one could expect her to come out of a war in one piece, could they? She wouldn’t have expected that from anyone else, so why was she expecting it from herself?

The fight was over. There was still work to do, but she had won her battle. She wasn’t expected to lead an army against the Reapers, to keep a brave face to rally the troops. Now, there was no one looking to her to lead, to boost morale, to do much of anything.

Hell if that wasn’t the scary part: the idea of doing _nothing_ , sitting idle for any length of time. It drove her crazy, in all the worst ways. Immediately after Torfan, she’d sat for six weeks relieved of duty pending a psychiatric evaluation, and then the six months in Vancouver. Both times she’d been idle and conscious during it, and she’d climbed the walls after a couple of weeks. It wasn’t as if she could go back to being an ‘ordinary’ Alliance officer, commanding a ship or a company; her celebrity would always interfere. Even the possibility of working as a private military contractor was out; she could change her name, but she’d be recognized because her face was everywhere.

She could retire on her pension—if Alliance Personnel Command still existed to give her separation papers and if the pension funds hadn’t been depleted funding the war effort—but then what? Was she supposed to spend the rest of her life as a civilian? Some officers, after retirement, took up politics, but bureaucracy pissed her off at the best of times. She was no biotic or combat engineer, whose skills could be put to use in a civilian setting. She’d been trained to kill things and to make sure she got the shot the first time.

Being alone was one thing. Serving on crowded ships, sleeping in quarters, hot-bunking in sleeper pods, and growing up in a small farming colony where a teenager couldn’t do anything without it getting back to their parents had made her appreciate solitude when she got it. It was returning to civilian life that scared her now, more than anything.

Fuck it. She’d face it down, just like everything else she’d had to face so far. Frightening, but nowhere near as scary as Reapers or Collectors or the hopes and lives of an entire galaxy resting on her.

It was no worse than crawling through a jungle for three days to line up _one_ shot, even if it was as scary as her first parachute jump, or the first time she’d gone into open space without a tether, but she’d do it.

***

“Sound off!” The assembled crowd of Alliance personnel—soldiers and techs and specialists alike—looked damn good in uniform, standing behind her. Someone had talked her into leading a run for morale, and Shepard was glad she’d agreed. Even people technically still on the sicklist could join in, as a solidarity thing.

“ _One, two!”_ The response was deafening; there were more people here than she’d thought. More people had survived and had made it here to run with her.

“Sound off!”

“ _Three, four!”_

Behind her, soldiers carried an Alliance flag and a UNAS flag, and unit colours were on display in the crowd, in flags and banners. They were still whole, still the galaxy’s best damn navy, and when the signal went up to begin their run, the men and women who’d been through hell following her gave her a cheer.

She thought that she should be cheering them but kept that to herself, because they would always disagree, no matter what she said. Shepard lengthened her stride and settled into the pace, calling, “Sound off!”

“ _One, two!”_

“Sound off!” The pack moved fairly slowly behind her, crossing the shuttle landing pad and making their way across the base, toward the hangars, but the response was strong. They’d survived. They were here and they could rebuild. She almost believed it, the enthusiasm of the group catching. The sound of a couple hundred pairs of booted feet thundering across concrete echoed in her ears, as did their response to her call:

“ _Three, four!”_

This was an easy run for her; she’d been running since she was a teenager, after all, but this wasn’t _about_ the physical challenge or fitness. If you put a group of soldiers together and told them to run, they’d run, she’d explained to Liara. Humans didn’t have the single-mindedness of the turians and hadn’t always gotten along with each other, which was where morale boosters like this came in.

“Sound off!”

“ _One, two!_ ”

A newsbot swept by, taking in the scene, but Shepard ignored it. This wasn’t about the press. This was about marines being marines, about pulling their shit together enough to rebuild. Soldiers on the ground were leading similar runs, in ruined cities. They could do it.

“Sound off!” 

“ _Three, four!”_


End file.
